NanoKnife Surgery in Lexington
Baptist Health Lexington: NanoKnife Surgery
NanoKnife therapy technology targets cells with electricity versus heat or cold in order to maintain the integrity of your blood vessels. Learn more about the NanoKnife surgery for cancer from Baptist Health Lexington.
NanoKnife Surgery HealthTalks Transcript
Shaun McKenzie, MD
Most cancers that come from solid organs, so cancers that don’t come from blood cells, will require surgery at some point during their treatment. That would include cancers of the GI tract, breast cancers, cancers of muscle and bone, and then, cancers of the lung. Those are some in particular.
The benefit of the NanoKnife treatment is, in particular, in those tumors that are either attached to or wrapped around blood vessels that we can’t remove. It uses electrical pulses as opposed to heat or cold to create cell death. The benefit in that is that when you have tumors that are wrapped around blood vessels, the blood vessel wall is relatively acellular, but the tumor obviously is very cellular, and so we can treat tumors that are encasing or wrapped around blood vessels right up to the blood vessel but preserve the integrity of the blood vessel.
I think it’s important for the patients of Kentucky to have multiple access points for their cancer care, and traditionally for this approach, many patients had to drive several hours just to be evaluated. Now that Baptist Health Lexington offers this approach, patients can have better access to it.
